Workers unite! Or else!

TWO DAYS AFTER Flossie Pennington returned to The Seattle Times in the aftermath of the newspaper strike, she was called into her manager's office. Pennington, who held an administrative position in the advertising department and served as a picket captain during the strike, says her manager told her that she wasn't being friendly enough to her strike-breaking colleagues. "I wasn't smiling enough," Pennington recalls her manager telling her. "My body language was unapproachable."

At the Times, strikers will get along with strikebreakers— or else. That, at least, is the message some staffers say they are getting in light of the company's new "post-strike addendum" to its "bias-free workplace" policy, nicknamed the "anti-shunning policy" by employees. Just as the Times prohibits harassment or discrimination on the basis of race and gender, so it now does on the basis of "ideology related to unionism." Forbidden behavior, according to the detailed page-long policy, includes shunning, unwelcome jokes, and any type of retaliation related to the strike.

If the policy is an attempt to make the Times one big happy family again, it hasn't yet done the trick. Since the strike settled January 8, the union has filed 70 grievances against the paper. Overall, tension is considerable amid wide-scale and unsettling changes, including downsizing, reorganizing, and scaling back of editorial coverage. The Times is, staff and management agree, a different paper after the strike. What's less clear is why, and what the ultimate effect will be on Seattle's largest daily newspaper. It is not really a surprise that things are different at the Times after the strike, given its behavior during the walkout. The strike lasted seven weeks at both of Seattle's dailies, but the Hearst-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer seemed to take it in stride, whereas it was a more personal affair at the family-owned Times. Publisher Frank Blethen and his managers acted betrayed when their exceptionally well-treated employees, as they saw it, walked out. Strikers, in turn, felt betrayed when managers guarded the building as if threatened by a marauding mob and then proceeded to hire permanent replacements for people they had once called irreplaceable.

Employees at the P-I are having quite a different experience. No jobs have been cut or changed; no grievances have been filed. "A lot of people are saying to each other in the hallways, 'God, I'm glad I don't work for The Seattle Times," says Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild President Ruth Schubert, who is also a P-I reporter. "That has not always been the case."

It is a testament to the rawness of emotion generated by the strike at the Times that many staffers and managers say there's little point in discussing the experience with each other. "Nobody wants me to go out there and talk about working 49 days straight," says Executive Editor Michael Fancher, "and likewise, I don't particularly want to hear what it was like walking on the picket line."

In any case, there is plenty of current news to focus on. The bleakest is the Times' downsizing. Because of the millions of dollars the company says it lost during the strike, it wants to shed 10 percent to 20 percent of its 2,500-person staff. According to a company memo, at least 82 people have decided to go voluntarily, taking advantage of early retirement and severance packages. Aerospace reporter Chuck Taylor—who served as managing editor of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record—and editorial columnist Casey Corr are two of the latest to join an exodus of talent that includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Nalder and Microsoft expert Paul Andrews.

As the company considers what other positions to cut, it is bringing strikers back in stages from a recall list. While a settlement agreement with the Guild gives the company until July 9 to call strikers back, it has already summoned in more than 70 percent, putting callbacks ahead of schedule.

Nonetheless, the Guild claims that the Times is leaving strike leaders lingering on the list, and many of the grievances filed by the Guild concern such cases. (The grievances are currently the subject of nonbinding mediation.) "Unable—and apparently unwilling—to put the strike behind them for the sake of labor relations, advertisers, and readers, Times managers have turned to a ground war," read a letter submitted to the journalism Web site Media News on behalf of a staffer by Guild President Ruth Schubert.

A cause c鬨bre is copy editor Ivan Weiss, a 33-year veteran of the Times, union shop steward, and notorious heckler of "scabs," as he calls them. By his own account, Weiss yelled at top bosses Blethen and Sizemore as they crossed the picket line. Sizemore insists the company is bringing everyone back, including Weiss, strictly according to seniority and job classification, as the settlement agreement demands. And in truth, compared to most of those who have returned to work on the copy desk, Weiss does hold a slightly lower job classification—which he believes is related to his outspokenness predating the strike (but that doesn't help him with his present grievance).

Management vehemently denies that they are considering workers' strike-related actions. "All the changes that have taken place are related to the need to be successful from a financial point of view," says Times President Mason Sizemore. The company says the strike cost it millions of dollars, though it won't provide any specific numbers.